This house was the home of the Netherbury Grammar School for nearly fifty years so it isn’t a surprise that the first recorded name we have for it is The Schoolhouse. The early history of the Grammar School is uncertain but there are records of it having been in operation from the middle of the 16th century. It went on to become the Beaminster and Netherbury Grammar School whose School Magazine claimed there was evidence in the British Museum that it was founded even earlier, before 1490.
The first edition of John Hutchins' "The history and antiquities of the county of Dorset", published in 1774, says of Netherbury:
"Here is a charity school for teaching Latin, Writing, reading, and arithmetic, endowed with £30 per ann. and an house."
There is no record of where that house was until the 19th century. In his book "A History of the Beaminster and Netherbury Grammar School" Derek R Woodland says:
"By 1830 the old school premises had become dilapidated and were falling down. A house situated near the Church in Netherbury was chosen for the use of the Schoolmaster and a schoolroom capable of accommodating about 60 boys was erected on the site of the later Reading Room, at a cost of about £100."
Most accounts suggest the schoolroom was built behind the house where there is a long, single-storey, extension and not over the road in the position now taken up by the Reading Room.
The Tithe Map of 1835 shows the house on what was then called Paradise Street (now New Inn St.) with its owners listed as the Parish Officers and occupied by John Purslow who was the Schoolmaster at that time. His daughter, Margaret, was Baptised at St Mary's Netherbury in 1825 and married there in 1851 with her father recorded as the Schoolmaster on both occasions.
The building bears a date stone above the front door saying it was rebuilt in 1853. The details of the reconstruction are not known but the property occupied much the same footprint after the rebuild as it did on the Tithe Map, drawn up eighteen years earlier, so it is assumed that the house was rebuilt pretty much along the lines of it’s original design.
The refurbishment of The Schoolhouse coincided with the arrival of a new Schoolmaster. In the 1851 census Edward Ludlam was recorded as Master of the Clipston Grammar School in Northamptonshire alongside his wife Harriet who was listed as Mistress of the Ladies School. Harriet died, almost certainly in childbirth, the following year. In May of 1853 the marriage of Edward Ludlam and local Farmer's daughter Elizabeth Davy is recorded in the Netherbury marriages register and an announcement in The Southern Times, Weymouth on 28th May describes him as “master of the grammar school”. Ludlam was listed as the Netherbury Schoolmaster in various directories from 1855 and remained in post until the school controversially merged with the Tuckers Charity School in Beaminster.
In 1877 the Charity Commission approved a plan for the Governors to retire the 61 year old Ludlam on an annual pension of £60 and to sell him the Schoolhouse for "not less than £300". The following year the freehold on the property was "enfranchised" by the Manor of Slape, releasing it from its old CopyholdType of feudal land tenure
with duties and obligations
to the Lord of the ManorType of feudal land tenure
with duties and obligations
to the Lord of the Manor tenancy, and the Governors sold it to Ludlam as had been agreed. By then Ludlam had married for a third time after Elizabeth, his second wife, had died in 1860 and after a couple of years in retirement he sold the Schoolhouse to Anthony Taylor of Shere near Guildford, Surrey for £600. The 1881 census lists Ludlam living with his family in St George, Bristol with his occupation recorded as "Income from Houses & Land".
Not much is known about Anthony Taylor the first owner with no links to the grammar school. He was born in Kirby, Yorkshire and the year after he purchased the Schoolhouse, the 1881 census records the 32 year-old's occupation as "Law Student at the Bar Under-Graduate Cambridge University". In the census a decade later he is described as "Living on own means". He married Kate Gilbert four years before they moved to Netherbury, at St Nicholas' Church in her home town of Brighton, when he was described as a "Bar Student". A search of the British Newspaper Archive reveals that he was the owner of several class winning Irish Setters that he entered in Dog Shows both near to home and further afield including: Bridport, Cardiff, Devon, Dublin, Warwick & York.
A piece in the Bridport News in September 1894 said "Mr. A. Taylor, of Netherbury, has recently been exhibiting some of his valuable dogs in Paris, Antwerp, and other places, and has succeeded in gaining several first and second prizes. It is certainly a feather in the cap of Netherbury that two such breeders of valuable dogs, and well known members of the Kennel Club, as Mr. A. Taylor and Mr. N. D. Smith should reside within its borders."
Taylor died in 1897 leaving the Schoolhouse to his widow Kate about whom even less is recorded apart from her will which she made up in 1903 and then altered by adding a codicil in 1909.
Her will is unusually detailed starting with a list of 15 specific bequests of various pieces of jewellery. There are then eight “pecuniary” legacies of £25 each including one to “my old servant Elizabeth (Bessie) Bullock” and one to “our old man servant Thomas Welshford of Netherbury”. She then directs that the residue of her “real and personal estate” should be converted into money where necessary and divided between various nieces and nephews.
She goes on to specify that “my trustees shall not sell my freehold residence at Netherbury… so long as one or more of my said nieces shall be living and a spinster”. She instructs that, so long as they remain unmarried, they should be permitted to live there “so long as one of them resides therein for at least three months of the year”.
Kate died in 1910 but the house, which was now called Netherbury House, was not sold by her executors for three years. Unfortunately it has not been possible to ascertain if any of her nieces took up residence during that period but it was eventually sold to John F. R. Willshire, an Insurance Superintendent from Bridport, in 1913.
Examination of the Electoral Registers of the time show that Willshire, who lived at 22 St Andrews Rd, Bridport, owned other houses including two in Princes St, Dorchester as well as "houses" in Winterborne Abbas. The only occupant we have any record of during Willshire's ownership is Mrs Caroline Nedham. He was still living in St Andrews Rd when he sold the house to John Hodges, a retired farmer, for £700 in 1919.
Hodges moved into the house with his second wife, Sarah, but after eight years she died and there is a memorial curb dedicated to her in St Mary's churchyard. He married for the third time three years later in 1930. Hodges was now aged 75 and his third wife was Mary Cossins, a School Teacher, some 22 years his junior. In his will, made up in 1940 the year before he died he directs "I desire that no mourning shall be worn and no flowers sent, at my funeral. I wish to lie in the same grave as the Mother of all my children." The Mother of all his children was his first wife, Georgiana Elizabeth. He left his surviving wife Mary £1,000 but went on to say "I direct that my said wife shall have the use of my house and furniture rent free for her own use until she can with reasonable speed make arrangements to remove to her future home."
The house was to be sold and the proceeds divided between Hodges’ seven children. Although it wouldn’t have been clear at the time World War Two was at a turning point. The Battle of Britain had been won, against the odds, the previous autumn and the “Blitz” bombing of London and other major cities in the UK was drawing to a close. Germany was switching its focus to its “Eastern Front” and launched an invasion of Russia on 22nd June 1941, the day before Netherbury House was put up for Public Auction at the Greyhound Hotel in Bridport.
The highest bid was £2,100 and Sir Dudley Burton Napier North K.C.V.O; C.B; C.S.I.; C.M.G; of Warblington Castle, Havant, Southampton, an Admiral in the Royal Navy, became the new owner of Netherbury House.
Up until the beginning of the year Admiral North had been the Flag Officer Commanding the North Atlantic, based in Gibraltar. Unknown to the general public Admiral North had been relieved of his command and replaced as the Flag Officer in Gibraltar after a loss of confidence in him by the top of the hierarchy at The Admiralty.
Admiral North felt he had been the subject of a huge injustice, an opinion shared by a great many within the navy and outside it. The general belief was that he had become the "scapegoat" for a botched naval raid on the West African port of Dakar which was ill conceived from the start and poorly executed but was championed by both the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and France’s General De Gaulle. North was to spend most of the rest of his life trying to clear his name but chose not to do so publicly until the war had ended so, when the Norths arrived in Netherbury none of this was in the public domain.
Dudley North had served in the Royal Navy in the first world war and was made a Captain in 1919. Prior to that he'd served alongside both George Mountbatten, and his brother Louis who would go on to become Earl Mountbatten the last Viceroy of India and briefly the first Governor-General of the Dominion of India. In the 1950s Mountbatten was made First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff and he was an uncle of Prince Philip (who was to become Duke of Edinburgh), and a second cousin of King George VI. This was to be North’s introduction into royal circles which, after WWI, saw him become a naval equerry to the Prince of Wales who he accompanied on many royal tours. He eventually rose to the rank of Admiral Commanding Royal Yachts, became a Knight Commander of the Victorian Order and an Extra Equerry to King George VI.
His wife, Lady Eilean, had apparently spent much of her childhood in Dorset which is possibly why they settled in Netherbury when he returned from Gibraltar. The Admiral joined the local battalion of the Dorset Home Guard – as a private but, according to Lady North, he was made up to a major within a fortnight.
North continued to attempt to clear his name “behind the scenes” privately campaigning to have his case brought before a Board of Enquiry or a Court Martial without any success. In the winter of 1942 he heard he had, at last, been given a new posting as Commander of the naval base at Great Yarmouth. This was not quite Gibraltar and his rank was reduced to Rear Admiral but he took up the post in Norfolk, the UK’s most easterly port. His family stayed in Netherbury, unsurprisingly, as Great Yarmouth was the target of many air raids.
When the war was over Admiral North felt he was able step up his campaign for justice and take it into the public arena. Meanwhile in 1946 Lady North bought the neighbouring property, Myrtle Cottage, including the orchard which sat between it and the garden of Netherbury House.
In 1955 the Norths moved to Parnham Lodge, the old gatehouse of Parnham House, and sold Netherbury House along with the orchard which used to belong to Myrtle Cottage to John Blair. Myrtle Cottage itself had been sold a few months earlier to William Hatton Richardson. The following year Richardson bought the southern third of the orchard from Blair for £99. The conveyance for this sale contains the first record we have of the name Stonehouse for what used to be Netherbury House so it was presumably Blair who gave it its current name.
John Blair lived at Stonehouse for twenty years with his sister, Alison. He eventually died in 1975 at the age of eighty followed by a seventy eight year old Alison, four years later. They are both buried, alongside their parents and a younger brother, in their family grave site in Kilmacolm, Inverclyde, Scotland where the inscription describes them as “Elder son John of India and latterly of Netherbury Dorset” and “Daughter Alison latterly of Netherbury Dorset”.
Alison left the house to Katherine Marion Cowan and during her ownership it was designated as Grade II Listed and included in the official list of buildings of historic interest on 31st July 1984. She died the following year, in 1985, and her ashes are interred just up the hill at St Mary’s.
The next owners were Geoffrey Passey and his wife Kathleen. They were early adopters of domestic solar power because, despite the house’s listed status, they were granted planning permission to “Fit solar panel to rear elevation” in 1986.
As well as the usual sources, two books were used in researching this page:
A history of the Beaminster and Netherbury Grammar School by Derek R Woodland, 2005.
A matter of expediency - The jettison of Admiral Sir Dudley North by Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, 1978. ISBN 0 7043 2169 6.
